Seund Ja Rhee

Biography

In 1958 a gallery in Cannes showed Seund Ja Rhee’s work for the first time, and she saw the French coast. It is usually said that she moved to Tourrettes-sur-Loup that same year, though by another account she bought a small house there only a few years later. By some accounts a stone shepherd’s cottage served as her studio; by others she rebuilt and enlarged the house herself.

She was born on 3 June 1918 in Jinju, when Korea was under Japanese rule. She finished girls’ school in Jinju, then studied in Tokyo, at Jissen Women’s University; the dates differ: by some accounts she entered in 1935, by others she finished her studies in 1938. In 1938 she returned home and married. The number of her sons is given differently: three or four. In 1951, because of the Korean War, she was separated from her children and left for France. In 1953 she was admitted to the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, where she studied painting with Yves Brayer and Henri Goetz; by some accounts she also studied sculpture with Ossip Zadkine. Technical disciplines then followed one after another. At Stanley William Hayter’s studio, Atelier 17 (by some accounts in 1955), she became interested in woodcut and engraving. In 1956 she studied ceramics with Robert Pérot and Micheline Perrot, and in 1966 mosaic with the Italian Riccardo Licata at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In 1956 her work was also shown at the Salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

Her abstraction is built on geometric patterns and restrained colours. Korean symbols and written characters appear in it. She regarded the Eastern idea of yin and yang as the foundation of her language. According to some scholars, from the 1950s her bold, expressive brushwork broke up into tiny strokes forming planes of colour, and motifs of women’s experience entered her subjects. She spent most of her working years in France and learned from French schools, but, to my mind, the themes of her work remained Korean. This can also be seen in the house she built in Tourrettes-sur-Loup in the 1980s, which embodied the utopian city of her paintings.

She collaborated with the writer Michel Butor: together they tried to join the visual arts and literature. Besides easel works she made woven wall hangings, mosaics and books of poems.

She exhibited mainly in France and South Korea: she had 84 solo and almost 300 group exhibitions. Among the group shows were the Ljubljana Biennial (1963, 1965, 1967), a showing at the Museum of Art and History in Geneva (1965) and the Buenos Aires printmaking biennial (1968, 1970, 1972). She was introduced to the Korean public in 1965. Solo exhibitions at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, took place in 1970, 1978 and 1988, and in March 2018 the museum marked the centenary of her birth.

In 1991 France made her a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and in 2002, by some accounts, an Officier of the same order. In 1996 she built the “Milky Way” in the Korean style, a large studio and exhibition space.

In 2009 she gave the city of Jinju 376 works, among them 77 oil paintings, 13 watercolours, 28 drawings and 237 prints. She died on 8 March 2009; the place of death is given as Paris, by other accounts as Vence or Tourrettes-sur-Loup. A museum in her name opened in Jinju on 16 July 2015.